Special Guest Blogger: Alan Rickman

My most compelling movie characters often stemmed from reality, Hans Gruber was loosely based on Andreas Baader of the West German Terrorist group Red Army Faction and Professor Severus Snape took his cues from my school teacher John Nettleship while Bruce Willis in Die Hard drew inspiration from some discarded planks of wood left outside a construction site.
I came to movies quite late, i was 42 when i got my break in the Die Hard movie, before that i was running my own graphic design business and one day after i was just about to turn 30, i thought blow this and dropped absolutely everything and signed up for acting classes which didn't do a lot for my financial security so i supported myself by working as a dresser for other actors which is literally helping them put their clothes on but i did meet some big names but any interaction was limited to 'fetch me my codpiece, boy'.
This went on for a decade then finally i was cast as one of the leads in the stage version of the book Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The play was a hit and was soon adapted by Hollywood as Dangerous Liaisons and everyone involved in it became internationally famous, except me, because they replaced me with John Malkovich.
However, it did get me considered for Four Weddings and a Funeral but Hugh Grant pipped me for it as he was better looking and then i got the offer of the villain in some action movie with some TV actor named Bruce Willis. Something about a bunch of terrorists taking over a skyscraper but as much as the budget went on Bruce Willis wages, i was hired because i was cheap and that is how one of the most distinctly English-sounding actors alive was hired to play a German.
That led to a career of playing villains and it all started with Die Hard, a film where a person sneaks around a tower at night trying to avoid me and ended with Harry Potter, a film where a person sneaks around a tower at night trying to avoid me.

Special Guest Blogger: Charlie Chaplin

Fate ordained that Adolf Hitler and i should make our entries into the world within four days of each other and that little Austrian had an effect on my life and career.
I remain one of the most instantly recognizable film stars of all time and my face become so iconic that some people don't even realise i was a real person and not just a generic mascot for black-and-white movies sporting what would eventually become the most unfortunate moustache ever.
I was a huge star of the silent film era, making several films featuring the Little Tramp character, as well as a handful of scathing political satires, including The Great Dictator, which ridiculed Hitler before making fun of Hitler was cool. The movie was a huge financial success and it's widely considered to be my masterpiece mostly for the epic four-minute speech at the end but it was the speech that led to me being investigated by the FBI and called to testify in front of the House
Un-American Activities Committee.
My speech raging against world governments was reprinted in leaflets by the Communist Party and the FBI began taking a closer look at my file and once my left-wing views became known, i was called an anti-American Commie.
While in London for the premiere of my next film, Limelight, the U.S. kindly invited me to stay the hell out by revoking my passport, effectively exiling me from the country.
Me being a Communist was pretty obvious, my films were intend to be well aimed shots against poverty and inequality with the common theme always the poor guy handing it to the wealthy and powerful so my pro-Communist messages should have hit everyone squarely between the eyes at every turn.
This slipped under the radar as possibly Communist, as did my friendship with William Z. Foster, who would go on to become general secretary of the Communist Party of the United States of America.
Ironic as it was that at my height i was the second largest earner in America, $13,000 a week from the Mutual Film Corporation.
When you know all this and hear the Great Dictator speech where i said lines such as: 'In this world there is room for everyone and the earth is rich and can provide for everyone' and 'Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give you the future and old age and security', you realise that far from just being that man with a Hitler moustache who fell over a lot, i was subliminally showing pro-Communist messages to millions of Americans in the most anti-Communist country in the World and got paid $13,000 a week to do it.
Got to love that and i'm proud that a silent movie star spoke one of the greatest monologues in the history of movies.

Special Guest Blogger: John Holmes

I know men look at me and the 20,000 women i had sex with with my 13 inch penis while making over 2,500 porn films and think lucky git and so they should, i had sex with 20,00 women, made over 2500 porn films and had a 13 inch wang, wahey...what's not to be jealous of??
Before making my big break in the pornography industry, i worked as an ambulance driver, a shoe salesman, a furniture salesman, and a door-to-door brush salesman and tried my hand at a job stirring chocolate at a factory which gave me strong wrists which would come in very useful later but my big break came whilst standing next to a man at an urinal who happend to be a porn director and noticed my package and before i knew it i was earning $3,000 a day and having sex with everyone.
If there was a way to be filthy, i tried my hand and one or two other body parts at it but i developed a very expensive drug habit and i had to start looking for new ways to make money, like prostituting myself to men and women and credit card fraud and some other illegal dealings, ended up in prison and eventually contracted HIV, withered away to 90 pounds and died three years later.
Porn actors and actresses don't seem to get the recognition we deserve, there is only so many times you can see Brad and Angelina posing for photographs on a red carpet or Kate Winslett blubbing in front of a podium before you reach the conclusion that God, these gong giving events are brain numbingly boring.
While the more mainstream actors and actresses are getting their backs slapped, we should also celebrate the actors and actresses who get slapped onto their backs. Or up against a wall. Or on the bonnet of a car. Actually, almost anywhere and porn is becoming big business, the porn film Pirates 2: Stagnettis Revenge cost $10 billion to make and is loosely based on the Pirates of the Caribbean film although i don't remember Johnny Depp doing that with a ho ho ho and a bottle of rum.

Special Guest Blogger: Zhengde Emperor

The boring thing about Democracy is that they almost never elect truly crazy people, some are voted in that are a bit weird and some that are borderline crazy but not 100%, out of their tree loopy.
Back when rulers took the throne based only on their bloodline, they let pretty much anyone be emperor in those days and a nation could wind up under the rule of someone who was literally insane which must have been a nightmare for everyone involved who wasn't the Emperor.
Many of the ministers expected that i would become a benevolent and brilliant emperor like my father but i took the throne of the Chinese Empire as a immature 14 year old and remained 14 for the next decade and a half of my rule, building a whole fake city block on the imperial grounds where i would pretend to be a shopkeeper with my invisible friend called Zhu Shou whom i would send on raiding parties to fight the Mongols and he did well although we did share a thing about Eunuch's.
He would order the genitalia of captured soldiers to be cut off and strung up for display in public and i gave the Eunuch's in my court control over the government so i could devote myself to pleasure seeking, my thinking was if they got no testicles how much trouble can they cause.
Being a teenage boy with power, i indulged myself in women, at one point created a palace and initially housing exotic animals such as tigers and leopards but after one tiger clawed me when i tried to pet it, i had them all killed and turned it into a harem with as many beautiful women as i could find although i forgot to feed them and most of them died, my bad.
On another occasion i burned down my palace by storing gunpowder in the courtyard and i eventually died in predictable fashion after getting really drunk and falling off a boat during a fishing trip.
I don't know why China decided to pack in the whole Emporer thing, me and Zhu Shou thought it was a blast.

Special Guest Blogger: Hank Williams

I know y'all Brits think that Country and Western music is for men in dungarees called Billy Bob or Bobby Joe who say things like 'That's a pertty mouth on you, boy' to unsuspecting canoeists after engaging them in a banjo playing contest but it isn't all about stetson wearing escapees from the Dukes of Hazard singing depressing songs about how our dog died and our wives left us taking our pick-up truck. 
I was big news back in my day, mostly amongst red necked Americans with southern accents, buck teeth, mullets and holding guns but they make us tough in the American South and it's lucky they did because Heavens to Betsy that moonshine was strong stuff. 
The South has an obsession with moonshine, it promotes a do-it-yourself attitude and since everyone did-it-themselves, they made it as dern tootin strong as they could but it's hard to actually enjoy moonshine because enjoying moonshine means that you drank enough to forget just how awful the stuff is but it does explain why so many rednecks came to think they been anally probed by aliens.
With names like Mule kick or Panther's breath, as long as the drink's title doesn't include the name of a fruit, it doesn't matter what was in it and my ma made the finest hooch this side of the Mississippi.
Just as my songs about hunting, marrying your cousins and dilapidated trucks made banjo playing good ol boys in stetson hats happier than a tornado in a trailer park, the moonshine took it's toll and i died an alcoholic aged just 29.
I was one of the very first to employ the 'Die Young and Sell a Ton of Records' technique, i even wrote a song about it called 'I'll Never Get Out of this World Alive' which seems a bit obvious as nobody does, it's no secret that everybody dies and you need to grasp that fact and write a song all about it just before you die.
It was your standard down-on-your-luck country type of stuff about my wife leaving me and dying horribly and my own blood clots in the heart and neck bought on by my years of chronic alcohol abuse made sure i barely made it out of 1952, dying on News Years Day in 1953.
As for today's music, it's destroying the radio and is only enjoyed by those who can't appreciate how crucial Hawaiian guitars and wash boards are when constructing anything musical.

Special Guest Blogger: Jack Mytton

The British Aristocracy is often held up as proof that rich people are idiots and i can't speak for all of the Aristocracy but i certainly was both, rich and an idiot.
I was always the kind of person that parents would tell their kids to steer clear of at school. I was expelled from one for getting into a fist-fight with a teacher, then went on to get booted from another school for keeping a horse in the dorm room.
Coming from a wealthy family and inheriting a fortune and not having a job and having lots of time on my hands, i fancied having a go at being a politician and deciding it was easier than campaigning, i spent £10,000 bribing enough voters to elect me to Parliament and then quit the next day because it was boring and if there was one thing i couldn't abide, it was being bored.
I once rode a horse into a hotel, galloped up the staircase and jumped out the window for a dare but the attempt to jump a horse drawn carraige over a fence wasn't quite so successful.
I would fox hunt in the nude and one time hired a bear and rode it to a party where it promptly bit me and then attacked the guests, strangely the parties invites dried up for a while after that.
I invented a medical breakthrough though in the shape of a cure for hiccups. After drinking heavily i had a bad case of the hiccups but none of the conventional cures got rid of them, so i lit my shirt on fire and after a servant beat out the flames, my hiccups were gone. I heartily encourage you to try it at home.
I died due to an alcohol problem, namely i had spent all my money and couldn't afford to buy anymore so in shock at being alcohol free for the first time in decades, my body fatally went into the DT's and i died but boy did i have a fun, hiccup free time.

Special Guest Blogger: Olivia de Havilland

It is said that life is fleeting, but some of us, like me, just go on living so long that journalists who had pre-written my obituary have all since died.
I was an actress in Hollywood's Golden Age and had all the catty feuds, illicit scandals, iconic roles, and steamy romances to prove it.
Catty Feud - Tick. Extra points for it being with my own younger sister, Joan Fontaine, who was also an actress. As i was the older sister she was always jealous of me, i said she couldn't use her real last name, 'De Havilland', because that was mine and there couldn't be two us us so she went with Fontaine instead.
Illicit Scandals - Tick. The very much older and very much married, hard-drinking director John Huston. John F Kennedy who was using Hollywood as his own personal harem at the time and he put the moves on me but i dismissed him as a slime-ball, which he was, so i was right.
Iconic role - Tick. Melanie Hamilton in Gone With the Wind, Maid Marian in The Adventures of Robin Hood.
Steamy Romance - Tick. Perm one from Jimmy Stewart, Howard Hughes or Errol Flynn.
My sister and i feuded right up to her death aged 94, she said 'I married first, won the Oscar before Olivia did, and if I die first, she’ll undoubtedly be livid because i beat her to it' but strangely enough i didn't give a damn and i was perfectly okay with her winning that one.
I died just after my 104th birthday as the only Gone With The Wind film's lead actor alive, the other three leads had all died more than 50 years ago which is ironic as in the film, i was the only one to die out of all the lead actors.

Special Guest Blogger: Walter Raleigh

Most people know me for bringing potatoes and tobacco back to Britain but i was so much more than spuds and fags, i was a swashbuckling Renaissance man who had more than his fair share of wild stories from my time as a politician, courtier, explorer, spy, soldier, poet, and i still found time to write The History of the World.
I probably should have done the potato and tobacco thing at different times, the amount of times i saw people trying to light up and inhale the potato was embarrassing but once they worked out that the idea was to eat the spud and stick the burning leaves in their mouths they were less reluctant.
I went looking for El Dorado, the lost city of gold after i told the Royal Court that it was definelty, certainly 100% guaranteed there but i never found it but i did find lots and lots of Royal funding to carry on looking and between tropical diseases, a great suntan, bags of brown lumpy things and plants you could inhale, i spent much of my adult life going on adventures at the behest of Queen Elizabeth I, who thought i was great and kept giving me things but the fine carriages, money, luxury estates and as many girls as my tongue could cope with annoyed people, most importantly the soon to be King, James.
The 'coat-in-a-puddle-for-the-queen' trick worked a treat but when Liz died, King James accused me of treason and i decided to defend myself in court and as i later served 13 years in the Tower of London you can guess how well that went.
With time on my hands i did write the first two volumes of the History of the World, the entire history of human civilization starting with the Greeks and Romans which i presented to King James as a 'sorry about the whole treason thing' and he let me go to continue my exploration of the New World as long as i promised not to attack the Catholic Spanish already there.
I crossed my heart and hoped to die and then attacked them for which i was rewarded by having my head chopped off and given to my wife when i made it back to England.
She had it embalmed and carried it around with her for the rest of her life in a red bag but my proud legacy would be introducing the smokers cough and chip shops to England.

Special Guest Blogger: Grace Kelly

Although i was a famous actress in my own right, these days i'm best remembered as 'Princess Grace' after my marriage to Prince Rainier of Monaco.
Before that i was known to have had quite the dating life, falling for so many of my older male co-stars including Bing Crosby, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Ray Milland and David Niven. Such was my reputation of having it away with the stars that Jimmy Stewart's wife would stay on set and would even drive him to and from set every day to make sure he couldn’t get up to anything, or rather i couldn't.
Another notable tryst took place in the early '50s with randy future President John F. Kennedy but statistically every woman who was breathing would have had that distinction if he hadn't have died.
During the filming of The Country Girl, i was involved in a love pentagon with four actors but then my Prince came and the whirlwind affair was everything a girl could wish for, if her wishes included undergoing a fertility test and proving i was a virgin, which i obviously wasn't but they swallowed the 'my hymen tore when horseback riding' so off i went to live a Royal life in Europe.
As for my legacy, the biggest film i was connected to was one i never starred in but came across while sitting on the 20th Century Fox board of directors.
Some young director came in to pitch for a nerdy space fantasy film which was pretty much the dreams of a grown man who had been playing with action figures on his mum's kitchen table too much but as the the board of directors were unsure, i had the deciding vote but i really didn't give a crap about a geeky space film so gave a bored shrug, which they took as consent which meant Star Wars was made.
I could have done with a Millennium Falcon that day i suffered a stroke and drove my car off a mountain but an American actress becoming a European Princess, that's never going to happen again.

Special Guest Blogger: Oliver Hardy

Before i met Stan Laurel, i went under the name Babe Hardy and before a career getting slapped around the head with planks of wood and carrying piano's up flights of stairs, i started out playing villains in silent films and met my future comedy partner in a film where i robbed him.   
I was the first Tin Man in the original 1925 Wizard of Oz movie but the most famous partnership in comedy came about due to me injuring myself with a leg of lamb.
I was due to appear in 'Get 'Em Young' but just as the filming started, i was unexpectedly hospitalised by the lamb and Stan who had been working as a warm up man was asked if he could step in at the last moment. Being English he of course said yes and that was his big break.
The studio noticed that my rotund figure and Stan looking like a walking stick-man looked funny and we had a chemistry and began teaming us together which led to the start of a Laurel and Hardy series and probably the second most famous toothbrush moustache in history after a certain Austrian gentleman.
This style of moustache was one of the most popular styles at the beginning of the 20th century with me and Charlie Chaplin sporting the tuft of hair below the nostrils but the German Chancellor made it an icon of the right-wing Nazi Party and sadly that brought it's popularity to an end.
As moustache's go, it is a bit of a silly one but it will now forever be known as the Hitler 'tache but we also popularised bowler hats and the painful act of people getting whacked with ladders as colleagues turned around on building sites ever since.